I Wish

Chapter 45

I was so sick of feeling like I was fighting a war against some sort of toxic entity that was hiding in my shadow and waiting to ruin everything. It was as if I got a small moment of happiness, and then if someone or something else didn’t ruin it for me then I’d freak out and do it myself. I want to go home… Okay, so I had wanted to go home. Now that I was going I couldn’t think of anything worse, and I missed my family. That wasn’t stifled or some far away thing I couldn’t remember unless I was directly thinking about it. I missed them, it hurt and I wanted to go home. Now I am going. Even if we hadn’t left yet I missed Ivy already, and it hurt. Go figure huh? Talk about self sabotage. I think we’d both put the state of my clothes after Isaac had finished with me out of our minds, but when I went to go find them they were gone. Torn, bloody, dirty and beyond saving would be my guess. I put on some of Ivy’s clothes, and her face twists painfully as she sees me. Good.

“That’s not fair,” she whispered, voice heavy with something I couldn’t identify. I was currently too messed up to want to bother with figuring out what it was.

“Name one thing about any of this that has been fair,” I said in return, my tone so calm and even that you wouldn’t be able to guess that I was upset just by hearing it. The laugh she let out was a little hysterical, and we linked hands. Without another word the two of us leave. I’d tell you more about the journey if I remembered it. The only thing I could remember was a vague staggering after her, clumsy and staring at our joined hands the entire time. I expected her to stop at the forest, and I’d walk on my own from there, or the back of my house again. No. This time we marched through the dark, because it was dark now, and walked back the way I’d come. 

“Alright, we’re back where you started. Five minutes after you left, as promised,” Ivy murmured, swallowing. I was glad that it was dark. It allowed me to pretend I didn’t see how her eyes gleamed with unshed tears, but there was no denying how tightly her hand gripped mine. 

“Five minutes?” I repeated in wonder, and slightly disbelieving. It had seemed like something she could pull off no problem, back at her palace in her fae realm with castles in the clouds. Totally possible, and not just that, it made sense. Now staring at my house, with my family sleeping inside it, I wondered what I had been thinking that no doubt had crossed my mind.

“Yes, you know I can lie to you,” she replied, and the bitterly tired tone she uttered had a wave of guilt making it’s best attempt at drowning me. I shot her a filthy glare, rather than spend any more time acknowledging my own feeling of insecurity. “I won’t be able to come back, not once I’ve left here,” Ivy explained when I didn’t respond to her, “I’m picking up where we left off, so I can see you in five minutes from now. From my perspective, anyway. You would have to redo all the time you would have been missing in the human world, without me.”

“Because you won’t be here,” I finished in a tone that committed to me showing no feelings about this whatsoever. She nodded.

“And it’s important that you remember that, and you don’t go looking for me. All you’ll run into is past me, and past you. Which is a whole other problem that we do not want to be dealing with,” Ivy said, shuddering delicately.

“I’m not stupid. I know that two versions of me meeting are to be avoided at all costs, and I have no desire to test that theory,” I said, and you could hear it in the way that I said it. The lilts to the words that just softly screamed, ‘buuuuuuuuuut.”

“However,” she said, trying to hurry me up into spitting it out. 

“However,” I said, stretching out the word unnecessarily, “I am curious, as to what specifically this whole other problem would look like.” The considerate look on her face should have been terrifying, but I was too busy giving into the compulsion to memorise just how beautiful that face was. The level of not okay I was with not being able to see it for the foreseeable future wasn’t even subconscious at this point, and I was getting a headache. 

“You know how there are all those spatial distortions, like the cosmos fields, and time doesn’t work right? Which is why I’m able to walk you home like you’ve never been away in the first place?” she asked me, chewing on her bottom lip. Absently I reached forwards with my empty hand and pulled in from between her teeth. “Lets just say that there’s a price to meddling with time magic, more than the wriggle room we’ve been graced with,” she finished finally, catching that hand in hers and pressing a kiss that tingled to it before letting me go. The tiny smile I gave her was completely involuntary, and judging by the amount of smug it generated, she knew that.

“Homebound, I gotcha. They tell a lot of stories about the consequences of time travel. I was just wondering who came closest,” I told her, and for a few more moments we just stood there and stared at each other. Neither wanting to move on to the next logical conclusion of what came next, separating. Damn it, these were my demands. I didn’t get to be a baby about it now that they’ve been delivered upon.

“You better go inside before someone realises that you’re out here and comes looking for you,” she told me, studying me as if she was never going to see me again.

“Ivy,” I started, but she put a finger to my lips.

“I’ll miss this version of you,” she confessed, “But I look forward to seeing you again when the time comes.” Past history had me feeling incredibly suspicious about the wording of that, but my current pity party didn’t allow me to put as much oomph behind that as I should have.

“You’ll miss this version?” I asked as though I was giving her the benefit of the doubt.

“Humans grow so fast, you might be different when I see you again. That’s okay though, I’ll still be happy to see you anyway,” she told me, and if she hadn’t said it so earnestly… like it was a promise that should make me feel better instead of distinctly unsettled, then I might have broken it down into small parts just to clarify that what I was hearing was what she was trying to get across. 

“Will you change?” I enquired instead, and she looked pleased that I’d asked. Rather than offended, as I ashamedly realised in hindsight I was aiming for.

“WIthout you, it’s doubtful. Now, off with you before I steal you away again, and this time don’t give you back,” she teased, stroking my cheek with her thumb. I leaned into the affection, knowing that this was going to be rough without her.

“Ivy, baby, if there’s one thing I’ve proven it’s that I can irritate you into dropping my ass right on back where you found me,” I said with a hollow laugh. I was in her arms in an instant. She’d wound herself around me like a python faster than I could blink.

“You weren’t able to be happy with me, and I don’t think that’s possible until you’re living life here to compare it to something that isn’t a memory. It wasn’t good for you, but please don’t take me giving you the space you need as me not wanting you,” she growled, and the air rumbled as she shifted through syllables, “But I’m going to do the things that are best for us, not best for me.” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer, and I was really getting sick of that head-caving-in pressure headache that was keeping me from doing so. Ivy just sighed, and planted one on me. Like it was the last time it was ever going to happen. It was like coming home, and the noise I made when we’d separated had her squeezing her eyes shut, and I placed a small final kiss on her lips. A tiny little victory, stolen just for me. 

“Love you,” she called softly after me, before almost literally disappearing. I don’t know if that’s because my brain skipped several beats, or because she just up and disappeared. That pang of loss when she did so wasn’t insignificant, and even so it had to fight like hell against knowledge that she loved me. She loved me, she loved me, she loved me. I think, I considered tentatively, that sleeping on all of this was a good idea. Tomorrow will be easier. Tomorrow would make sense.

No, no it wouldn’t. Can you hear me snickering, because I am hardcore laughing right now, and it has to be said - without Ivy is was not pretty.